This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009.

I'm Caleb Brown. General Stanley McChrystal says failure in Afghanistan will be assured without more troops.

President Obama meanwhile says he inherited an Afghan war strategy that was adrift.

But what would success look like?

And what does the president believe constitutes a better war strategy?

And why is leaving Afghanistan simply off the table?

Malu Innocent is a foreign policy analyst at the Cato Institute and co-author of a new paper, escaping

the graveyard of empires a strategy to exit Afghanistan.

General McChrystal says we need more troops and a new mission. Without a new mission,

our current mission should basically come to some sort of end. Is that about right?

Right, well I'm not sure really what McChrystal, General McChrystal is getting at because the

stated mission for the United States is to disrupt defeat and dismantle al-Qaeda.

And that's something that's a narrow and feasible objective for the United States to achieve.

The problem with that is that the administration keeps opening the aperture, so to speak, and begins to say that the United States must also

disrupt and defeat its extremist allies, Al Qaeda's extremist

allies, and we sort of are beginning to see a more broader nation-building aspect to all of this,

not just the limited targeted strikes against al-Qaeda, which is a narrow

counterterrorism approach, but this broader population-centric counterinsurgency

aspect, which essentially would require hundreds of thousands of troops for at

least 12 to 14 years, not including the last

eight. So that's the stated mission. It's gone from this narrow counterterrorism

approach to a more broader nation-building aspect where we're requesting our military to protect the villages of Afghanistan.

...